In the past few days, I’ve written two complete blog posts that I didn’t publish. The first was so insidiously tone deaf that I didn’t realize it until I was proof reading. It was so awful, I nearly printed out a copy of it just to burn it. The second was about politics, and I may use it yet, but honestly, no way in hell. It was so dumb, dumb, dumb, it would probably go viral.

Writing teachers, myself included, tell their students that sometimes you don’t know what you’re writing about until you’ve written it. What they don’t tell you is that sometimes the mystery you’re exploring is a smug heap of secondhand colostomy bags in the Bakersfield sun.

Figuring that out for yourself is part of being a writer. As is throwing away work. The crud, the indulgences, the merely okay.

I chucked away three hours at the keyboard. Wasting my time is better than wasting the reader’s. That’s showbiz.